Perch @perchingpath@eldritch.cafe

Gayfeather, colic-root, rattlesnake-master, blazing star,( devil's bite, Cahaba torch, prairie-pine,) I took your list to that fireworks store in Upland, gathered & checked off each rocket, then imagined how you'd stare at a forest fire (guilty? gleeful?) as I put them all back.

Albuterol suffuses me with energy & skittering terror and I've been using it every day since the ragweed kicked off end of last week. Deluxe apocalypse feelings.

Watched a raucous murmuration of starlings descend on an oak to tear its squirrels' nests to shreds, sprays of leaves & twigs exploding from points around the tree as the mob circulated.
http://www.perchingpath.com/scratch/twitter/201910/starlings.ogg

Your skin shining as you're conducted to the Night Conservatory by swaddled, goggled ushers.

Choosing to use a location as your memory palace is choosing to haunt it. Whatever's left of my grandmother's house in Yonkers is haunted by echoes of her & by paintings whose dates & titles I needed for an exam seventeen years ago. The Haunted Mansion is packed to the walls.

At 17 I wore one of those perfumes that attempts to evoke thunderstorms via cod-petrichor & a hint of ozone, but it actually had the exact pleasant but mundane scent of a specific drizzling afternoon moment of October 9th 2019 as inhaled through a histamine-throttled nose.

Found a feral scroll. I peered in from the end and what runes I could decipher indicated that it was a desirable egg-laying venue and I should put it back.

Late 200X in my library office with the door locked, listening to this with my forehead leant against the window, staring disconsolately at snow falling on Squirrel Hill roofs. David Sylvian briefly contextualizing my decaying corpse into picturesqueness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sKWFmPgKV0

No, I'm pretty sure the beat's made from a sample of that clip of Blixa Bargeld stirring a pot of squid risotto on German TV. The sound has a uniquely savory, maritime texture that I recognized immediately.

One night, walking in the woods, I came across a bonfire & a crowd in a clearing. There were two men stood either side of the narrow trail I'd been following, staring at me, so I asked if they were guarding it. One mumbled "no" kinda sheepishly, & they shuffled aside to let me pass.

Eventually the the bridge and the borough will collapse, and the former'll be a jagged roadblock marking the border of some orchard owner horse breeder's fiefdom.

Just far enough out from the city for weird youths to become forlornly invested in me noticing them.
I initially thought the netting hung from the decomposing bridge was meant to inconvenience jumpers, but more likely it's for catching sloughed debris.

When I paint the nail of one ring finger a contrasting colour it means I'm married that week. A divorce may be declared abruptly with my teeth. That's the local custom.

So sick, anything I read or listen to risks segueing directly into fever dream. What comforts me without also hurting me? I can't think. Are the early 90s Cocteau Twins albums all there is?

Several slavering ghouls around a table poking gingerly at a dish of marrowfat peas, looking up at me with betrayed confusion in their blood-rheumed eyes.

I was queued to buy a broom and the dude ahead asked if I was setting up my college apartment, unwittingly forming a precisely opposed symmetry with the coworker who asked if I had any kids in school yet when I was 19.

Feeling grateful to adolescent ersatz-boy me for keeping her old stuffed animals around with a lesser exertion of the mulish resolve that kept her hair long & her nails polished.

When a devil inhabits a goat, you know that's a devil who wants to be beautiful.

I guess in ten years I see myself binding randomly selected & trimmed paper in embossed roadkill leather. Just haunting the highway shoulders, maybe breaking into office buildings with a pressure-washer full of chromium wastewater from the tanning? I really don't have firm plans.

Private slapstick update: Managed to whip the soup-laden tail of a slurped udon strand up behind my glasses to flick myself in the eye.

I can't find any conlangs with contrastive double-articulations that make tongue bifurcation a prerequisite to comprehensible speech.